The Stakes Are Real in the Yukon as a Modern Gold Rush Is On

Prospectors Must Claim Their Turf on Foot And Keep an Eye Peeled for Grizzlies

Mining companies in the Yukon are hiring teams of hardy individuals to mark off prospecting claims the old-fashioned way--with wooden stakes. WSJ's Chip Cummins reports on the new gold rush in Canada's Yukon territory.

By

Chip Cummins

Updated April 28, 2011 12:01 a.m. ET

WHITEHORSE, Yukon Territory—Denis Jacob has been staking claims for gold-company clients since 1975. But he's never seen a frenzy quite like the one playing out in the Yukon—Canada's western-most territory and the site, more than 100 years ago, of one of history's greatest gold rushes.

Mr. Jacob is part of a small, secretive band of "stakers," who hike miles at a time across the territory's mountains and forests, hammering wooden stakes into the ground. For years, they've quietly marked off and registered land for mining companies, who then have the right to explore for riches underneath.

As gold prices have soared—setting a new record Wednesday of $1,516.70 an ounce—stakers have done what they typically don't: They've worked straight through the harrowing Yukon winter. Some recent discoveries of gold here have stoked activity.

In recent years, companies have been registering about 15,000 claims a year, according to a spokesman for the Yukon government. Almost none of those were made in the winter, he said. Last month alone, however, companies made 18,472 claims—bringing the total for the January-March period to 34,022.

The Yukon government, unlike much of the rest of the world, requires a miner to stake out his turf on foot; claims are then registered at one of four mining-recorder offices in the territory. It has, over the years since the great gold rush here in the 1890s, published detailed regulations, including guidelines on the size of the stakes.

Most years, stakers take a pause in the Yukon's long, cold winter. Avalanches and temperatures below minus-20 degrees Fahrenheit are just some of the dangers. In spring, there's another worry: grizzly bears.

"The bears are poking their heads up," Mr. Jacob said earlier this month over eggs and coffee at Best Western's Gold Rush Inn here in the Yukon's capital.

Each morning, a crew of about a dozen of his stakers pack snow shoes and an axe. Just after sunrise, they board one of three rented helicopters, which ferry them to remote, snow-blanketed valleys and treeless mountain tops.

They then march off for hours on their own, hammering in stakes and marking trees with an axe, or with flags. The rules are complex, but the work essentially gives their clients the rights to explore underneath the ground they stake.

Mr. Jacob's mining-contracting company, Coureur des Bois Ltd., is one of just a few that specialize in staking, among other services. He doesn't typically identify his clients, who don't want competitors to know what territory they're interested in. Mr. Jacob keeps his company's logo off his trucks, and he passes out maps to his men only at the last minute.

"When we ask, 'where are we going?' he just says, 'we're going east or going west,'" says one of Mr. Jacob's stakers, Benjamin Fromme, 25. "Everything's on the low-down."

The first step in making an exploration claim often involves a clandestine visit to a mining-recorder office. "People come in when no one else is around, take a look at the maps and ask very specific questions," says Janet Bell-MacDonald, mining recorder for Dawson City.

ENLARGE

Rob Clarke stands by a stack of wooden stakes.
Chip Cummins

Her inspectors sometimes helicopter into the hills themselves to examine times and dates on the small, metal tags attached to each stake identifying claims.

If there's a dispute between stakers, inspectors pore over photos sent to their office to determine who was on the ground first.

In the faded mining town of Faro, about 300 miles south of the Arctic Circle, Mr. Jacob's three helicopters, along with other aircraft—mostly leased to mining companies—have taken over the local air strip.

Last month, the airport recorded nearly 300 aircraft movements, 10 times as many as the same month last year. In previous winters, air-traffic controller Michel Dupont could go "two weeks without hearing the radio crack."

On a recent morning, staker Tyler Quock, 24, and Robert Clarke, 39, one of Mr. Jacob's long-time crew bosses, piled into a waiting chopper. They had previously dropped stakes, wrapped in bright orange tape, from the helicopter onto mountain terrain. On this sortie, they had to hammer them all into the ground in the right place before they could register them in town.

After dropping off Mr. Quock, the helicopter banked over a ridge and put down Mr. Clarke in a clearing, covered with as much as four feet of snow.

ENLARGE

Robert Clarke

Using a hand-held global-positioning device and a compass, he ascertained where to hammer in the first stake, and scrawled the date and time on the metal plate. Then he trudged exactly 1,500 feet over the snow to where another stake had been dropped, and hammered it in. He "blazed" the line between the two, cutting notches in trees or tying biodegradable flags around shrubs and tree tops.

"This could be pretty—potentially—quite good ground," he said. He pointed to a mountain in the distance. His teams staked most of it over the past few years, he said.

Using his snowshoes as skis, he slid down a steep embankment onto a frozen stream. He inched over the ice sideways, testing for cracks, before scrambling up the opposite bank, where the chopper was waiting.

The work carries a measure of adventure, and danger. In November 2009, one of Mr. Jacob's men was buried in an avalanche shortly after stepping out of his helicopter. A colleague spotted the antenna of his hand-held radio and managed to dig him out.

A few weeks back, Mr. Jacobs' men started carrying extra gear: two cans of a chemical akin to bear mace, to be sprayed as a last line of defense. They also pack "bear bangers"—pen-sized devices that make a loud noise to frighten the animals away.

Mr. Quock has had three close calls in a year on the job. "I've never been charged by a bear," he says. "But it's still scary as hell, even seeing one from far away."

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